The TLDR: Google Analytics can provide misleading insight into the ROI of your marketing channels. So at Charlie Oscar, we deploy advanced data models that can identify the true revenue drivers and triggers throughout your brand's entire marketing mix.
Recently at Charlie Oscar, we've been thinking about how complicated attribution has become and how easy it is for marketers to underestimate the value of all their marketing efforts. So for our latest insight deep-dive, we passed the keyboard to our Chief Data Officer, Dan, to explain why this is happening, and how he's helping brands at Charlie Oscar understand the real value coming from their channels to help drive growth.
Attributing the ROI and ROAS (Return On Investment and Return On Ad Spend, for those who aren’t fluent in marketing slang) of digital marketing has been a challenge for many years. I have been working with FTSE 100 and FAANG companies for the past 15 years trying to solve these challenges, and it remains a challenge for even the biggest digital advertisers.
Digital marketing talks a good game about being able to track a user from ad exposure through to purchase with total accuracy and transparency. The reality is, that is far from the truth.
Anyone with a basic understanding of human behaviour knows that you don’t see an ad for a brand that you've never heard of before and instantly click through to buy the product without any other thought. But that is the basic premise of last-touch attribution, which remains the default attribution standard in digital marketing. It's most likely the method you're currently using to see channel attribution in Google Analytics, Shopify, or in your customer tracking.
Google Analytics will usually show high volumes of sales coming from Direct traffic. And the most effective paid marketing source will often be Paid Brand Search ads (when people type your brand name into Google). But we know that people don’t just wake up one morning and decide to type a brand name into a URL bar or into Google. Those searches and direct sessions are caused by something. And that is where marketing attribution gets a bit more complicated.
This complication frequently leads to misleading ROI for marketing channels. So all of your marketing efforts that lead people to making those brand searches rather than clicking on ads and buying a product straight away are terribly undervalued. Standard digital attribution values the triggers of actions, but ignores the drivers of the triggers.
